Science fiction. Fantasy. The universe. And related subjects.

Main menu

Welcome to the YA Roundup, where we give you the low down on YA bookish news, gossip, new releases and cover reveals.

This week’s news covers the controversy surrounding John Green’s comments on Twilight, The Jungle Book’s return to film, the Kardashians’ book deal (we’ve given up on keeping up with them), and tons of covers to make your eyes glaze over and your wallet cry out for mercy.

The publishers plan to acquire eight to twelve manuscripts per year and already has a list of books coming out for their Fall 2014 lineup. These titles include The Isobel Journal, Half My Facebook Friends Are Ferrets, and The Diamond Thief. John Rahm is the senior product manager who is going to take Switch Press and rage tank into the market, with the help of his healer (editorial director) Nick Healy.

Cook books, craft and how-to titles for young adult readers sounds like a generally unique, untapped market. Time will tell how successful it will be.

Archie, Betty, Veronica, and Jughead Get the YA Novel Treatment

Archie Comics has been struggling to stay relevant with young audiences. After its disappointing non revelation about Archie’s final choice between Betty & Veronica, which was a horrible attempt of trolling on the publisher’s behalf, here’s the latest attempt to lure readers: YA novel the hell out of them. Dan Parent brings us Archie: A Rock & Roll Romance (February 25th) and Tania del Rio has penned Diary of a Girl Next Door: Betty (July 16th).

Dan Parent has written many Archie comics from Betty & Veronica: Best Friends Forever to Archie’s Christmas Stocking. He also introduced the first openly gay character in the series and has been writing for Archie since he graduated. One should assume he’s relatively familiar with the subject matter.

More on Archie’s book:

“Things are shaken up in a big way when Valerie, Josie and the Pussycats’ bassist, moves to Riverdale. In the style of the Archie Wedding and Married Life graphic novels, Valerie takes a stroll down Riverdale’s magical Memory Lane and is greeted with a vision of what her life would be like if she married Archie. Of course, the future is full of surprises!”

Tania del Rio adapted the characters into modern teens for Betty’s book and it’s described as:

“Betty Cooper has few of the luxuries that her privileged best friend Veronica Lodge enjoys, but she’s got something else that drives her wealthy friend crazy with jealousy. In a story full of heart and humor, find out how a normal, awkward teenage girl comes out feeling on top of the world in this hilarious new Diary series.”

I had expected at least one of these novels to actually be a mystery novel, one which explained why two awesome people like Betty and Veronica would be in any way interested someone like Archie. Now, that I’d actually read!

The Jungle Book Being Made into a Film. Again.

The Jungle Book

Ron Howard and Warner Bros have, according to reports I haven’t seen, been giggling and whispering at lunch time, and Brett saw them holding hands behind the agriculture shed during recess. Penny says they’re going to direct and produce a live-action adaptation of The Jungle Book. The Hollywood Reporter jumped in at the lunch table to state:

“Howard is poised to take the reins a month after Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu (Babel) fell off the project due to scheduling conflicts. (Inarritu is in postproduction on Birdman, his first comedy.) Callie Kloves wrote the screenplay for TheJungle Book, which is based on a story from an 1894 Rudyard Kipling collection.”

There have been many adaptations of the popular novel, including the Disney cartoon in 1967 and the 1994 adaptation starring Jason Lee and Cary Elwes which I watched because of Jason Lee and Cary Elwes. And yet, unsurprisingly, I was still disappointed.

Let’s hope Ron Howard will do a better job, and I’ll be interested to see how he handles the problematic colonialist aspects of the story for a modern audience.

The 5th Wave Gets An Awesome Award Because it’s Awesome

The Borribles

Rick Yancey’s The 5th Wave, a book about an alien invasion that gave me all kinds of feels, has gotten some well-deserved recognition by winning the Red House children’s book award for 2014. The interesting thing about this award is that it is, apparently, voted on entirely by children. No adult input. Which means I suddenly feel so much more promise for the younger generation! This in addition to Sony supposedly adapting the film of this which, if true, will make my heart sing. Tobey Maguire is also supposed to be producing this. Let’s hope Tobey doesn’t do anything unfortunate with it…

Other winners include Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler who both had wins in the younger children category, while Jennifer Gray had a win in the books for younger readers category.

This means Rick Yancey joins the likes of JK Rowling, Patrick Ness and Anthony Horowitz. Unsurprising because, like them, he still refuses to give me his unpublished sequels!

Books Too Inflammatory for 1980s UK to be Published Now

The Borribles

Tales of anarchic youths in the UK were pretty popular in the eighties, including Michael de Larrabeiti’s three-book series, The Borribles, featuring street children who’ve been alone so long that their ears turn pointy like mischievous elves from folklore. Unfotrunately, this just happened to be around the same time that significant anti-police youth riots took place in 1985—resulting in violent clashes between protesters and police—and de Larrabeiti’s original publisher, UK-based Collins Publishers (prior to its merger with Harper and Row), refused to publish the third book.

Linda Davis, Publishing Director of Collins at the time, wrote:

After the events of Brixton and Tottenham we have had to look at The Borribles in a different light…it is a novel that pits a gang of lawless young people against the police. We told ourself originally that this was OK because the story was an ‘urban fantasy,’ that Borribles were not real children, that the police were not real but comic characters. Nevertheless the battle between the law and lawlessness is glamorised and given a status, which we cannot appear to condone in children’s literature now that Britain has entered a new era in which this battle is a daily reality.

“The stories have drawn fans from China Miéville to Neil Gaiman and Cory Doctorow, who told the Guardian they were ‘one of the origin nodes of urban fantasy, a trilogy of books that are always wicked and never nasty, and a love poem to London’.”

Kendall and Kylie Jenner Releasing a Book

Having a young adult book ghost written (I’m assuming here, but c’mon…) in your name seems to be the new perfume brand of starlet income sources. With their new book Rebels: City of Indra, sisters Kendall and Kylie Jenner of questionable Keeping Up With the Kardashians fame join Hilary Duff (Elixir), Tara Banks (Modelland) and Lauren Conrad (L.A. Candy and The Fame Game).

Rebels: City of Indra had its cover reveal this week. (Check it out below in Cover Reveals section.)

“Kylie and I love the creative challenge and are thrilled to have been given the opportunity to share this story,” Kendall said, while her sister added, “We can’t wait to share these characters and the world we created with readers everywhere. We are so excited!”

Karen Hunter, of Karen Hunter Publishing, adds, “The story that Kendall and Kylie crafted is a thrill ride—one that their fans and fans of this genre won’t be able to put down.”

I want to say something snarky about this. However, it kind of mocks itself, doesn’t it?

John Green Telling People How Not to Be Misogynistic…

John Green is not only and incredibly popular young adult author, but also a YouTube and Tumblr celebrity with his Mental Floss and Vlog Brothers shows proving extremely popular, albeit not without controversy. This week he made several comments on Twitter that raised some brows and a little bit of ire from portions of the Young Adult blogging world.

When we make fun of Twilight, we’re ridiculing the enthusiasm people have for unironic love stories. Have we nothing better to satirize?

To be fair to John Green, he was recovering from being in surgery and apparently on some pretty good meds, but also, to be fair to everyone else—dude…

In the book blogging world, Meyer’s most vocal critics tend to be women who feel they have good reason to call out the unhealthy relationship dynamics, story themes and narrative faults in Twilight which, themselves, are fuelled by a paternalistic society.

John Green clarified on his Tumblr here, agreeing that there are problematic relationship dynamics in Twilight and criticising misogyny in art is good. He also claimed he was concerned that:

“popular work by women receives far more vitriolic criticism from the public (like, in terms of number of demeaning jokes made by Jay Leno*) than popular work created by men.”

Good point, and one we’d consider worthy of attention. John Green says he’d like to see sexism in popular work by men (Nicholas Sparks and J. D. Salinger, for example) given equal criticism. Finally, he admits that he may be wrong and is willing to learn. Those are some positive steps.

Ceilidhan wrote a rebuttal to Green’s comments on her blog, Bibliodaze:

I mocked Twilight too, because it scared me. It terrified me to see something so obviously wrong held up as the ideal romance, and criticisms of it dismissed as reaching or jealousy. It wasn’t just me either. Many other women talked, and we yelled and screamed because we were angry and bewildered that nobody else could see what we saw. We laughed at the clunky prose, the po-faced earnestness and the sparkling because sometimes we laugh to stop ourselves from crying. Satire is a powerful weapon, one governments often try to shut down. We never saw ourselves as being Jon Stewart or the South Park gang; we just did what we did in the hope that people would listen, and many did. The books still sold by the boatload and Stephenie Meyer has the kind of economic security that most women will never have. She has options because of it. None of this negates the abuse she has received but let’s not pretend that all women are on equal standing here.

John Green will never experience sexism. He will never have to scream and shout to have his opinion even acknowledged because of the platform he has and the fact that he’s a straight cis white man. He gets to be the saviour of YA while women who wrote stories like his for many years before him are long forgotten or left in the shadows. The sad thing is that his opinions on this issue will be held up as a wonderful example because we’ve lowered the bar for success so much to the point where a man acknowledging that women are people makes him worthy of a gold star. He is awarded for acknowledging issues that female writers have been discussing for generations, including in YA. John Green writes tales of universal appeal where women talking the same topics write romance.

This is an issue. This is privilege.

This came about at the same time as Aja Romano of The Daily Dot discussed how John Green, whilst deserving his awards and accolades, makes it hard for women to make their mark in YA.

“The Times has stuck by that dictum; recently its bestseller lists have been filled with men writing “realistic” YA, and the women of the book blogosphere are none too happy about it. This week the debate reached a boil after the Times’ listed, respectively, two women, three women, and three women on their top 10 lists for February. And two of the four women who show up have direct ties to Green. One is Rowell, and one is a biography of Esther Earl, the girl in Green’s life who inspired The Fault in Our Stars.”

The as-yet untitled books will continue in the same vein of gritty realistic fiction; the first book is scheduled for fall 2015.

Between Us and the Moon by Rebecca MaizelPublisher: HarperTeenRights: North AmericaAgent: Margaret Riley King (William Morris Endeavor)

A contemporary YA romance about a self-proclaimed science nerd who, over the course of one summer, falls for an older boy and learns that there’s more to life than what can be seen through a telescope, and more to herself than equations and experiments, along with a second contemporary YA standalone. The first book’s projected pub date is summer 2015.

Billed as a “YA Grey Gardens,” about a teen who lives in squalor in a crumbling mansion on Long Island and subsists on a mysterious trust fund—but who stands to lose everything when the secrets, lies, and scandals of the people around her are revealed. Publication is planned for fall 2015.

In which a 12-year-old would-be master adventurer embarks on a swashbuckling rescue mission when his parents are abducted by pirates, with the help of his greatest fencing rival, his pet cobra, and his trusty butler. A 2016 pub date is projected.